You can tie a tripling of the planet’s population over the last century to cheap energy that spurred industry, transportation, globalization, resource extraction, urbanization and technology.  Oil by-products have also enabled increasing farm yields, all year access to seasonal foods, and the growth of massive farm and food industries. These, in turn, have supported a very rapid rise in population. The down side includes climate stress and pollution, and cultural stresses due to urbanization, immigration and culture mixing. And that is just the impact of plentiful cheap fossil fuels.

The current rate of technological, social and political change, and the convergence of many major change pressures, is creating a very dynamic marketplace, full of opportunity and risk for most businesses.

We are seeing: hyper connected consumers, a new generation of media savy students and employees, fundamental changes in workplace environments, changes in employee-employer relationships and expectations, environmental change and associated concerns, multi-generational political upheaval in the middle east and the BRIC economies, fractured and polarized domestic politics, “helicopter” parents, globalized highly connected supply chains, constant downward pressure on prices causing fundamental changes in manufacturing and service industries, growing income inequality that can not be sustained, fragility of banks and whole economies and radical changes in energy supply and pricing. And this is only a partial list of the issues that can impact your business.

So you think your market is stable?

If you have a “stable” business with few if any change initiatives, then you are probably in trouble.  If a part of your portfolio is not allocated to change and corporate evolution, you are going to be supplanted.  You must be nimble, aware, connected.  Some have said that strategic planning is dead – they are dead wrong.  There is a need for continuous market and trend analysis, continuous change and a capacity and willingness to embrace change.  There is a need to do continuous real honest strategic thinking across multiple timeframes, developing and evaluating options and alternate business plans that future proof your organization and its products and services.

Today, your competitors may be half a World away. Your next competitor could be developing game changing technologies or solutions that are so radical as to completely disrupt your market.

Gen X and Gen Y employees have limited allegiance to your business.  They are highly mobile, have high expectations, and will not work for you until they retire. On the flip side, corporations are not expecting employees to be “company men”, staying for a lifetime of work.  As much as employees see companies as stepping stones, companies see many employees as commodities. The dynamic of work and employment has shifted.

Your kids twitter, like, text and are tech savvy. They have different buying habits, increasingly fondling products in brick and mortar stores then buying at the lowest price on line. They hop onto trends faster than before and can render your product to the has-been bin very quickly – potentially with a single viral video or tweet.

Small businesses today have access to technologies, tools and networks that make them globally competitive and extraordinarily agile. Overnight, we have seen IPads, Digital Photography, Wikipedia, Smart Phones, UAVs (drones), and global supply networks.  Whole industries have been displaced or realigned.  Imagine the World of 2020 or 2050.

Nimbility

All of this churn, change and transformation is hard. It challenges your precepts, and your comfort zone.  You must be nimble, or have, as my friend Janet Mason coined, “nimbility”.

Unfortunately, effective strategic planning is not easy. It is easy to regurgitate your existing plan, forecasts, value perceptions and market evaluations.  Good luck with that.

In a fast changing world, where even the most powerful brands are not secure from attack, disruptive forces and rapid technological change create opportunity and risk.  Your current plan is already obsolete once it is sent to the printer.

Implementing a strategic plan, particularly one that attempts to redefine your business in any significant way or capture a new trend or “blue ocean”, is extremely difficult.  There are powerful forces, both within your company and on the outside that will push back on even the “best” of ideas.  Many current successful products and service models were non-existent 10 years ago and were derided as doomed to failure when they first rolled out.

Take heart.  There are tools and methodologies and facilitation techniques that will help you to think and adapt with the best of them.  Today, if you are a small business with decent financials, you have an unprecedented ability to run with the big boys.

One of the forces that drove us out of the corporate corner office into independent consulting is that this period of flux is tremendously exciting and it is very rewarding to be able to play in multiple sandboxes, seeing the business world evolve through the eyes of multiple clients.